Nicholville Telephone CEO earns spot on Clarkson board of trustees

POTSDAM – Nicholville Telephone CEO Mark Dzwonczyk has been elected to the Clarkson University board of trustees. He will serve on the external affairs and internal affairs committees.

Dzwonczyk currently serves as the CEO of Nicholville Telephone Company, whose subsidiary, Slic Network Solutions, is deploying broadband Internet access to residences and businesses throughout northern New York with its high-speed fiber optic network via a $33 million federal stimulus grant.

Born in upstate New York and raised in the Boston area, Dzwonczyk has been building or re-building businesses in California’s Silicon Valley for the past 20 years. He spent the first 10 years of his career as an engineer at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory Inc. in Cambridge, Mass.

He built his first start-up the old fashioned way -- in a garage and bootstrapped on customer revenue. He grew it to be an international supplier of award-winning voice-over-IP products with design centers in California, complemented by engineering offices in China and contract manufacturing partners in Singapore and Malaysia.

In 2005, the company, Sigpro, was acquired by Guest-Tek, which at the time was the world’s largest provider of broadband to the hotel industry.

After two other telecom restarts, including one in Austin, Texas, Dzwonczyk was lured back to New York’s North Country to join the board of Nicholville Telephone in March 2011 and became its CEO in May of that year. As CEO, he has turned an aging rural telephone company into a leading North Country business with engaged employees, broadband technology unrivaled in the nation, and a tenfold increase in broadband subscribers in the past 18 months.

Dzwonczyk graduated from Tufts University with a B.S.E.E. summa cum laude in electrical engineering and a master of science in aeronautical engineering from MIT. He also studied information systems at Stanford University, but was pulled away by entrepreneurial passions -- the same passions that brought him to northern New York to bring broadband to unserved areas in the North Country.